It’s Hard to Be Penske Perfect When You Break the Rules

Thirty years on this exact weekend, Penske was not perfect. 

In 1995, Team Penske, the NTT IndyCar Series’ most fabled and successful operation that ever lapped the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, was bumped from the qualifying field. It was an embarrassment and the lowest moment in competition the team experienced.

Hard to top that. 

But, this past weekend, it tried. Instead of poor competitive performance, Team Penske made a different choice. It broke the rules. It’s impossible to be perfect when you do that.

When the team achieves great results, the moniker ‘Penske Perfect’ is used profusely, because that’s the expectation from its namesake. Roger Penske is as button-down and squared away as any man you will ever meet. He’s part grandpa – in his clean and proper presentation – and part Army drill sergeant with his discipline and elite standards.

But somehow, that reputation has taken quite the fall over the last two years, and it hit the bottom of a dinosaur-killing-asteroid crater this past weekend during qualifications for the 109th running of the Indianapolis 500. 

When it was announced that the two Penske cars for two-time defending winner Josef Newgarden and 2018 winner Will Power were not going to qualify in the Fast 12 and make a run for the pole, the news was startling. The pole is a big deal to Team Penske – it prides itself on the precision and effort it takes to put it on the front row. The team has done it 19 times, one less than its total victories in the race. This isn’t a go through the motions type of event for them.

For story gatherers, the focus had to shift to the qualifying though, with more details to come later. When they did, it was significant.

Team Penske broke the rules. 

It was clear cut – it modified a part of the car that it wasn’t supposed to, filling in seams in the rear where a piece called an attenuator attaches. Who knows what that would have granted them on track as an advantage. But it was a violation. For a team with the resources it has, you bet it knows the rule book through-and-though. So this isn’t some simple misstep. Case in point. 

As soon as United States Auto Club released the rules for stock block engines and boost levels prior to the 1994 Indy 500, Penske’s engineer team was ‘Johnny’ on the spot when they read it and learned there was a loophole in the boost. Out of that was born the pushrod engine that won Penske the race later that year. That is the detailed oriented approach that they have always practiced.

For Team Penske, this can’t be some minor rule overlook when it made the decision to fill the seams of the attenuator. It was a blatant effort to get around it – or worse, complete negligence. If that’s the case, then this team is looking a lot less perfect, and a lot more careless. 

What was to gain from this anyway? Maybe a pole and a check for $100,000. It is unbelievable that such a successful team would risk this which resulted in a big cow pie being smeared all over the pristine and glistening silver on the Team Penske haulers. 

On Monday (May 19), IndyCar president Douglas Boles announced penalties for Penske. Awkward to say the least, since the last man to penalize the Penske operation no longer runs IndyCar. The No. 2 and 12 were bumped – ironically – from the Fast 12 and slotted in the last row. Both race strategists – Tim Cindric for Newgarden and Ron Rezewski for Power – were suspended the race, and a $100,000 fine issued. 

This is the second Indy 500 both those strategists will miss. Penske suspended both of them for last year’s Indy 500 after it was found that the push-to-pass system was overridden on the team’s three cars and Newgarden used it when ineligible to at the first race at St. Petersburg. Of course the team vaulted back and won that Indy 500, but no one has forgotten that it had broken the rules earlier in the year. 

Now, once again the team’s reputation is the color of leftover rain water standing in a ditch. It takes a long time to earn trust back, and by the reactions from drivers when asked about the infractions after qualifying, including outside front row starter Pato O’Ward, Penske’s operation isn’t in the paddock’s good graces yet.

With the rules broken a second time in as many years, Penske’s squad has done nothing but enlarged the target on their back to behemoth proportions. Who knows if the team will ever be trusted again. Every win, every pole will be cast in doubt. Teams might put spotters in tech to ridicule the Penske’s chrome suspension cars when they go through from here until Elon Musk is waving the green flag on the AI Indy 500. 

Which brings all this around to a point O’Ward made – Penske doesn’t have to do this. In a day and age when the entire world is surrounded with notions of imbalance and unfair advantages whether in sports, politics, and personal lives over opportunity and wealth, IndyCar racing was about skill. A spec series with two closely matched engine manufacturers, all using the same tires and parts. It’s knowledge, technical skill and driver talent that set a team apart from the rest.

All you have to do is follow the rules. Do that and you can earn the respect of everyone around you. Just look at Alex Palou. He’s kicking everyone’s backside right now, including his teammate Scott Dixon who is one of the greatest IndyCar drivers of all time. No one is beating him. 

So far, he’s done it the right way, and the paddock is frustrated. Not because he’s some rule breaker or taking advantage. He’s just so good, and not one team has figured out how to consistently beat him. 

Penske doesn’t have that leeway right now. That entire three-car operation is mired in doubt, envy, and outright hatred. Add the element that Penske owns the series as well, and it just draws in so much vulnerability, with an inescapable message: twice it has tried to break the rules to its advantage. 

Now, the team has done it at the Indianapolis 500. While the penalties and the series might not eliminate it from the greatest race in the world, there’s one element that it no doubt angered. 

That’s the Speedway herself.

The spirit behind those walls doesn’t like to be played with. In 1995, she didn’t take too kindly to the pushrod, so she fought back, hard, against Penske. It paid the price. 

Come Sunday (May 25), over 500 miles, that Speedway might not let Penske be perfect. 

All because it broke the rules. 

Tom Blackburn

Tom is an IndyCar writer at Frontstretch, joining in March 2023. Besides writing the IndyCar Previews and frequent editions of Inside IndyCar, he will hop on as a fill-in guest on the Open Wheel podcast The Pit Straight. A native Hoosier, he calls Fort Wayne home. Follow Tom on Twitter @TomBlackburn42.